"Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis"

A discussion with Bernard Lewis at The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life:

.... You spoke before of the conflict of civilizations, a term that has been much used and even more misused. When I first used it, I was using it in one strictly limited sense, not as a general principle. Some have even written as though civilizations had foreign policies and could form alliances, and so on. I would never go that far. I was referring to one specific conflict between two specific civilizations. Christendom — I'll call it that for the present purpose — and Islam. And it is a conflict that arises not from their differences but from their resemblances.

These two religions, and as far as I am aware, no others in the world, believe that their truths are not only universal but also exclusive. They believe that they are the fortunate recipients of God's final message to humanity, which it is their duty not to keep selfishly to themselves like the Jews or the Hindus, but to bring to the rest of mankind, removing whatever barriers there may be in the way. This, between two religiously defined civilians, which Christendom was at that time, with the same heritage, the same self-perception, the same aspiration, and living in the same neighborhood inevitably led to conflict, to the real clash of rival civilizations aspiring to the same role, leading to the same hegemony, each seeing it as a divinely ordained mission.

We can date it precisely with the advent of Islam, which spread very rapidly by conquest. If you have ever been to Jerusalem, you must have been to the Dome of the Rock. That in itself is a mark of the conflict. It is built on a place sacred to both Jews and Christians. It is built in the style of the early Christian churches, the Church of the Nativity, the Holy Sepulchre and others. And the inscriptions on the wall are very explicit: He is God. He has no companion. He does not beget. He is not begotten — in other words, a clear challenge to Christianity. (Laughter.) The caliph who built that place in the late seventh century was sending a message. He put the same message on the gold currency. In other words, he is saying to the Christian emperor, your religion is superseded; your time has past; move over; we are taking over the world.

That was the beginning of a conflict that has been going on ever since. Now, we in the Western world, and particularly in the United States, don't seem to attach much importance to history. And even what happened three years ago has become ancient history. I find, for example, people seriously arguing that 9/11 was the result of our invasion of Iraq. This kind of reversal cause and effect is quite common.

In the Muslim world, on the contrary, they have a very lively sense of history, a very keen awareness of history and a surprisingly detailed knowledge of history. If you look at, for example, the war propaganda of Iran and Iraq during the eight-year war between those two countries, '80 to '88 — this is propaganda addressed to the general public, the largely illiterate general public — it is full of historical allusions, and I mean allusions; not telling them historical anecdotes, but a rapid, passing allusion to a name or an event in the sure knowledge that it would be picked up and understood.

Osama bin Laden, in one of his pronouncements, said, "For more than 80 years we have been suffering humiliation" (we meaning the Muslim world). That sent all of the experts scurrying to find out what on earth he was talking about, the old ones to reference libraries; the young ones to their computers. (Laughter.) And they came up with a wide variety of different answers.

To anyone who studies Islam or what goes on in the Islamic world, the meaning was perfectly clear. He was referring the suppression of the caliphate by the Turkish Republic in 1924. The caliphate was established on the death of the Prophet as the headship of the Muslim world. And as Muslims see it, the world of Islam was headed by a succession of caliphs of different dynasties, ruling in different places, Medina, Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo. The last one was in Istanbul, and it ended catastrophically after World War I, when the last of the caliphs was deposed, and the last of the great Muslim empires was partitioned, its territories divided between the victorious Western allies. That is what he meant by humiliation, and essentially there could be no doubt about that.

And just as the Muslim world was ruled by a succession of caliphs, so the world of the infidels and more particularly the Christian world, which was the main rival, was ruled by a succession of powers, first the Byzantine emperors, then the Holy Roman emperors, then the Western European empires, and — I'm quoting Osama bin Laden: "In this final phase, the world of the infidels was divided between two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United Sates."

We think of the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union as a Western victory in the Cold War, and some of us credit President Reagan more particularly with that victory. For Osama bin Laden and his followers, this was a Muslim victory in the jihad. And if one looks at what actually happened, this is not an implausible interpretation. It was, after all, the Taliban in Afghanistan that drove the Red Army to defeat and collapse. And, as he put it, "We have now dealt successfully with the more deadly, the more dangerous of the two infidel powers. Dealing with the soft, pampered, and degenerate Americans will be easy."

This impression was confirmed through the '90s when they launched one attack after another and evoked only angry words and misdirected missiles to remote and uninhabited places.

In order to understand what is going on, one has to see the ongoing struggle within this larger perspective of the millennial struggle between the rival religions now, according to this view, in its final phase....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 05/20/06 08:19:01 AM
Categorized as More Than Readworthy.